


Life Without You

by Skye_Willows



Category: Detroit: Become Human (Video Game)
Genre: Character Death, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Hopeful Ending, M/M, Please Check The Trigger Warnings, Suicidal Thoughts, Suicide Attempts, major angst
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-17
Updated: 2019-03-17
Packaged: 2019-11-19 13:05:41
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,694
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18136121
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Skye_Willows/pseuds/Skye_Willows
Summary: It was all a dream, right?Cole couldn't be dead.Hissoncouldn't be dead.This couldn't be real.-------------------------------------------------Even years later, the pain still cuts like a knife every day.





	Life Without You

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Dana](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dana/gifts), [connorssock](https://archiveofourown.org/users/connorssock/gifts), [TempusNoKitsune](https://archiveofourown.org/users/TempusNoKitsune/gifts).



> So, I've just ended up having one of the worst weeks of my life. To cope with my pain and grief, I ended up channelling it here, through another character who could relate in the worst way possible. Someone else whose world was turned upside down and shattered in the blink of an eye.
> 
> I'm going to warn you all now, I am not shying away from anything here. Every painful thought and feeling which has ripped through me in the past days has been vented here, as a coping mechanism. 
> 
> This work is dedicated to those who have reached out to be and been more help than I could ever describe, even in such a simple way as just **being** there. Thank you, so much.
> 
> **Trigger Warnings** : A lot of discussion about grief and suicidal ideations, including several attempts. This goes to dark places before it gets better.

The first time he woke, he was convinced he was still dreaming. It was the only explanation – because there was no way that any of this could be real.

He’d been dreaming, or more accurately, been having a nightmare, and rather than wake he’d jumped into another nightmare. It was possible, he’d ended up thinking he’d woken only to find himself still in a dream countless times. This was just another one, though it was the sickest one yet. A car accident where he was fine save for a dislocated shoulder, but his son had lost his life?

No, that wasn’t reality. The muttered words of apology being given to him through the cotton which seemed to have settled in his ears were nothing more than his imagination.

Cole couldn’t be dead. It just wasn’t possible.

It was a joke: a sick twisted joke that someone had decided to play on him. A cruel nurse that got their kicks out of trying to get their patients to break down as some form of demented entertainment. Watch them cry and make a fool of themselves, then tell them it’s all a prank.

Well, no way was Hank going to fall into their sick game. He wasn’t going to break down. All they were going to get out of him was a vicious glare for their troubles, and then he was going to wait for this dream to peter out.

_…Right?_

* * *

 The second time he came to and found himself back in the same hospital bed, he began to realise that maybe this wasn’t a dream. Maybe that car accident was real, and maybe he and Cole really _were_ in this place, recovering.

His mind refused to process the possibility that Cole hadn’t survived past his scattered memories of the accident. The crunching and squealing of metal, the smell of burning oil and rubber along with searing pain through his head.

Of course, his head! He’d been knocked around pretty good, of course his mind was playing tricks on him. A yelp escaped him as he tried to shift his dominant arm, but of course that had to be the one wrenched and dislocated, hadn’t it? Okay, time for plan B. Use the left arm to check what state his head was in.

A thick bandage, but he couldn’t tell if there was any swelling. Only his forehead was wrapped though, so whatever damage was done would be minor, right?

Good, that meant that Cole was most likely in a similar way. If this is all he came out with, his son – being only six and having the hardiness of children – would probably just have a few bumps and bruises.

So, first things first, he needed to get a nurse to help him out of here so that he could see his son down in the paediatrics ward. As simple as that.

_Wasn’t it?_

* * *

He’d gone back to his original thought.

This was a dream. No, a _nightmare_.

The worst fucking nightmare someone could go through. It just had to be…there was no way that this could be happening to him. No. Fucking. Way.

He’d not woken up in a hospital after his car getting obliterated by a truck, with a mild concussion and several lacerations to his head. He didn’t have a badly dislocated and wrenched shoulder that would take a couple of weeks to be back to usable again.

His son wasn’t dead, no. _Cole_ wasn’t dead. He couldn’t be.

Just that morning they’d been talking about what decorations to buy for Halloween. Cole had begged him to decorate the front porch and buy one of those tacky as shit skeletons for their door. Of course, Hank had refused, and told Cole that he could get either the crappy decorations or be taken out for ice cream later that night. Despite all that Hank thought he’d known about his son, Cole had actually turned down the ice cream for the plastic and badly painted rubbish.

That was where they’d been going, wasn’t it? To buy some fake blood to spatter over the heap of shit that Hank was refusing flat out to leave lying on his porch. He knew the ribbing he’d get for the half-assed attempt wouldn’t be worth it. Besides, since when was Cole into Halloween? His son had always made a big deal about Christmas, but never Halloween. What changed?

Why now?

_Why…_

**_Why-_ **

No, he wasn’t going to break down, he’d told himself that earlier. This wasn’t real, this was a nightmare. He was going to wake up, and it would all just be his fucking awful imagination doing this to him. Nothing had changed from this morning.

This was just personal guilt for not having given into Cole earlier is all. For not giving his perfect little boy everything he wanted.

He’d fix this once he woke up. They’d get the tackiest and crappiest of the Halloween decorations out there and swamp the house with them. Cole wanted Halloween? He was getting Halloween in style.

_Now I just need to find my way out of this nightmare._

* * *

  _This isn’t real. This isn’t **real.**_

All the murmured words of condolence from the nurses and doctors were just white noise.

Every word spouted by his colleagues that had dropped by – Ben, Jeffrey, a few others that he’d pointedly ignored – it was all just a racket in his head. Machinations, hallucinations.

Not real. Not fact. Not…

_This isn’t how my life is going to be. I’ve seen so much of it slip through my fingers, I can’t have lost my last piece of happiness. **No**_.

**_No. No. No. No._ **

**_NO._ **

It isn’t until he finally relents and lets the doctors wheel him down to another area of the hospital, he hadn’t really been paying much attention where, that he realises just how real this was. Not until he saw the small body covered by a sheet in a cold room on a metal table, and the bile rose through his throat.

Even when they left him in there it took – fuck, he didn’t know, it could have been seconds, minutes or hours – _some_ time before he finally peeled the sheet away to see the grey tone of the skin beneath. And then the features registered.

The same hair, the same nose and mouth. Eyes that would match his own if they were open, the same red birthmark right under his left ear.

This…lifeless being which he was staring at with shuddering breath was all too close to Cole. Why was did it look so much like his boy? Why would they bring him here?

_This isn’t happening, this isn’t real._

_It **can’t be.**_

Even an hour later, when they wheel him away, it still hadn’t registered. In his mind, he was still waiting for them to drop the act.

For Cole to come walking through the door. Waiting for his little boy to just jump out from around a corner, spook him, and get both the shouting and cuddling of his young life.

_Any time now._

* * *

 It wasn’t until Jeffrey took him home two days later that it finally began to sink in.

All the talk about investigations into the crash and whether Hank wanted help with all the funeral arrangements went in one ear and out the other. All the physical pain in his body was just this…awareness, buried beneath the numbing cold which had taken over.

Cole wasn’t here. He wasn’t anywhere, he was just…

**_Gone._ **

Everything he knew had shattered apart in the blink of an eye, and he didn’t know what to do with himself. Whether to scream, shout, drink, punch the living daylights out of the next person who came at him with fucking sympathy. That wasn’t what he needed right now. What he needed, was to fix this; for everything to go back to the way it was. Just them, in their own little imperfect world. They didn’t have much, but they didn’t need it.

Their home, their dog and each other. Everything else was just superficial, an embellishment on their space.

A crack had formed in Hank’s heart where his boy had once been, and he could feel it growing wider with each passing minute. It was only going to be so long before it snapped, and with it, he knew his sanity would go too. Cole had been his everything – his pride, hope, light and joy. The bright spark that helped to chase away all the shit that he saw every day in his job. While humanity tore itself apart in the world, Cole stopped the rot that would see him slide into the same spiral of hate and listlessness. Cole gave him purpose.

What did he have now, without that? Without-

The car stopped, and Hank barely uttered a few words to Jeffrey before stepping out. Once the car had pulled away and Hank made sure that he was truly alone, he finally pulled out his key and unlocked the front door. It had been too long since he’d been back home.

Excited barking from inside broke through his fog, and Hank almost managed to crack a smile when Sumo bounded around him enthusiastically. The St Bernard kept boofing at him for a few more seconds before he began to whimper, sniffing the area around Hank. It took the man mere moments to realise Sumo’s rapid change of mood.

He was looking for Cole. He’d not seen his young human in days, and Sumo couldn’t understand why.

Sumo was never going to stop waiting for Cole to come back, he couldn’t understand the concept of death.

_Death._

_Holy fuck, Cole’s-_

_My little boy’s **dead.**_

**_Dead. Lost. Gone._ **

The words finally rang true in Hank’s head, and with it the crack in his heart splintered right down the fault. As the ice within shattered apart into an all-consuming despair, Hank screeched out a sound which was almost inhuman. Collapsing to his knees and howling like a dying animal, the tears which he’d known were there but couldn’t bring forward came pouring out.

A river of sorrow and guilt which Hank had no idea how to stop.

* * *

 He never figured it out.

As those devastating days blew into weeks, months and then years, Hank never learned how to stem the flood of grief for the life he’d lost. The _son_ that had been torn away without Hank even having the chance to hold him one last time. Everything had been destroyed in the blink of an eye, by something completely out of his control.

Well, that wasn’t true. He could have not taken Cole out, could have paid more attention to the roads. Thrown himself in front of his little boy in the back to protect him, taken the blow that had cost Cole his life. So many things…there was so much he could have done.

**_Except_** -

The true fault of Cole death lay in the final moments of his innocent life. Bleeding to death on an operating table because the surgeon didn’t turn up, because the perfect fucking _machine_ which was meant to not be hindered by emotion and carry out any task perfectly, didn’t do its job. It just stood there and waited, and waited, and fucking _waited._

Even when the sirens blared to say Cole’s heart had stopped, it still did nothing. By the time another human realised what was going on, Cole was already long gone.

Learning that the day before his boy was due to be buried chased away whatever last shred of belief Hank had in life. Someone so young and innocent should not have died because a _machine_ was left to take care of him. Something which wasn’t _alive_ couldn’t appreciate the value in life itself.

And without his boy, life wasn’t worth living. Cole had been his world, and now it had crumbled to dust: scattered to the winds along with his old self. Cole wasn’t the only one who’d died that day. The Hank Anderson that the world knew died with him.

What was left?

A pathetic, sad old man who spent all his days drinking and dreaming of the day he would re-join his boy. And yet he wasn’t brave enough to do it was a full fucking barrel. He just had to leave that element of chance, didn’t he?

He’d tried pulling that trigger often enough with six chambers full to know his finger just wouldn’t obey. There had to be that damned _hope_ left, didn’t there?

His own mind and body was betraying him. He wanted nothing more than to join Cole in the cold ground, he had nothing keeping him here anymore.

Ben knew that if he didn’t hear from Hank for two days, to come around to collect Sumo. Jeffrey did too. Hank had no idea which one of them would do it in the end, but they’d both sworn that they would oblige by Hank’s wish. After they’d given up trying to talk him out of it that was.

For months they’d persisted, trying to tell him that giving up wasn’t the solution. There were mechanisms to cope with grief and loss, but who the **_fuck_** could understand this?

Parents weren’t meant to bury their children, it was the other fucking way around. He should have seen Cole graduate, get married, have kids of his own. Not-

_Not be as many feet under as his fucking age. He was **six.** How do I get to have over fifty goddamn years and he barely got **six?!**_

That night, he pulled the trigger eight times, with three out of the six chambers filled. Eight clicks and no bullets.

Hank was beginning to wonder if he was cursed. Cursed to wander the world as a drunken and soulless husk until the slow death from alcohol took him instead. Then again, knowing his fucking luck, he’d develop an immunity to it or some shit.

Why couldn’t he just have Cole back at his side again in the afterlife? If such a thing even existed.

* * *

Staring at the headstone now, five years later, he thought he finally had the answer. It wasn’t much, he’d not had anything much left of a like before everything went fucking nuts and he’d somehow been dragged into the middle of it. A crazy fucking week that turned his empty and monotonous life around.

The irony that it was an android – a lifeless collection of plastic and wires as he’d thought so often over the years – who taught him about life again was not lost on him. But really, Connor hadn’t done anything other than just be… _him._

He’d been someone so young and lost in the world, not to mention just so fucking _honest_ , that it was little wonder than Hank found himself drawn to him. A spark, a flame. Something to break through the haze of the drink, grief, worthlessness, guilt…Hank could spend hours figuring out words for his dark spiral, try to describe the thousands of needles which had ripped away the part of his heart where his son had once been and taken residence there instead.

Except it wasn’t something he could describe, not to anyone who hadn’t shared this pain. And it wasn’t something that he would wish on _anyone._

Days of nothing but tears and agony. Weeks of anger and hate, both at the world and himself. Months of losing himself to the gaping void in his soul, waiting for it to swallow him. Years of dancing with death, tempting it to at last drag him into its depths to see what awaited him on the other side.

Or maybe there had never been an other side. Maybe all death entailed was oblivion – all that made a person scattered into nothingness as their shell was left behind as a physical reminder that they existed at all.

He could had spent years wishing for something that could never be, but wasn’t that the fun thing about belief?

It didn’t always have proof – it just _was_. And Hank still believed that Cole was waiting for him. Somehow, somewhere.

Would he still be that little six year old when he reunited with him, or would he have aged along with Hank? Could he even appear as the man he should have been? Who knew?

Except, Hank wasn’t in quite the same rush to find out anymore.

Was it down to his newfound interest in life again? Partially. Connor had helped him find purpose again, even if it would never be _that_ much. He still drank, still ate like shit, but it wasn’t nearly as frequent as it once was. That self-destructive streak had been curtailed, and now Hank tried his damnedest to make something of each day.

And no, it wasn’t down to Connor solely. Okay, that was being entirely unfair to the android which had somehow managed to capture the shards of Hank’s heart and put him back into some semblance of a person again. Connor had done so much for him, had truly become a lifeline – but that wasn’t what had finally got Hank to stop playing roulette with his life.

While Connor had inspired the change with just a few words, and they hadn’t in the slightest been welcome at the time, it was a thought that had never left Hank since the statement left Connor. Since one horrendous night where Connor had come back to Hank pulling the trigger with the gun against his head, lost in another spiral of grief and heartbreak.

**_Is this the sort of knowledge you would want Cole to carry with him when he see you again? To know that his father was so lost to his grief that he destroyed himself? Cole wouldn’t know you like this! It would break his heart, in the way yours has shattered apart, to see that this is what his death had done to you!_ **

Hank hadn’t spoken to Connor for days, refused to acknowledge any form of contact with the android and vanished off the map. It had been entirely selfish and horrible, Connor hadn’t deserved to be stuck in that limbo of not knowing it he’d tipped Hank over the edge or not. Except, Hank had at first been too angry with him, and then too ashamed to come back.

Because as much as Hank hated to admit it, Connor was right. Cole would be devastated to see who Hank had become after his death. Would Cole even want to know such a sad drunkard like himself?

So he’d decided to try and redeem himself one day at a time. There was no quick fix to this – the blunt knife which was embedded in his heart would never face – but each day did get easier. Maybe it was with better distractions, maybe Hank was just learning how to live with it better.

It could be that Connor was slowly loving him into healing: that damned android giving _so_ much of himself over to see Hank live just one more day. He would never know what Connor saw in him, what that perfect android found worthy of his affection and time, but he’d given up questioning it. Connor was his own man, and if he’d decided that Hank is who he wanted to be with, Hank wasn’t going to demean him by telling Connor he’d gone nuts.

Whether Hank thought differently or not was irrelevant, but he couldn’t deny that life was brighter with Connor in it. He’d lost his perfect spark of life years ago, but a new one had appear to give him a glimmer of hope.

_Hope_.

What an alien concept that was to him in life now. After so long of being lost in grief, mourning and hoping for _death_ , changing sides was more than a little taxing. He still felt that call to the gun, that deadly game of chance trying to lure him back, but he wouldn’t do it. It would break both Cole and Connor.

Letting down one of them was already too much – to destroy both of them is something he _will_ not do.

So he does his best to be someone both of them would be proud of. Small steps, everyday getting either further or longer. Walking away from that black pit which he’d had one foot over for so long, as he came back to peace. His mind finally quieting against the chaos that had raged within.

Hank felt a hand rest upon his shoulder where he was kneeling on the ground, and he didn’t even need to open his eyes to know that it was Connor. The android was smiling softly with such a heavy mixture of sadness, pride and love that it was dizzying for Hank to stare at for too long, so he instead turned his eyes back to the headstone in front of him.

The date was now October 11th 2040.

It was five years to the day since Cole had been ripped from his life, and the pain still tore at his heart all the same. A wound that would never heal, nor vanish.

But despite that, it had scabbed. The river of sorrow, tears and despair had been stemmed, it not entirely stopped. Time was healing, however slowly.

Hank didn’t know what state he would be in when all his self-destruction finally caught up with him, but he knew now that when death finally claimed him, he wouldn’t be a shell that Cole would be ashamed to call a father. He would be nothing like the same man, but he was a worthwhile man all the same.

Someone worthy of both Cole and Connor’s love.

He’d never laugh again like he had with Cole, that was a treasure which had been buried with his son.

But, maybe…just maybe, Hank would have a good few stories and tricks to tell him.

And if they got an afterlife, he was going to make damn sure Connor got one too.

His one selfish wish was to have his whole family together again someday.

_Is that really too much to ask?_


End file.
